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hackingbear writes “Taiwanese technology giant Foxconn will replace some of its workers with 1 million robots in three years to cut rising labor expenses and improve efficiency. Foxconn, the world’s largest maker of computer components, which assembles products for Apple, Sony and Nokia, employing 1 million (human) laborers in mainland China, is in the spotlight after a string of suicides of workers at its massive Chinese plants. As labor regulations tighten up in China, human laborers demanding wage rises become replaceable.”

It may not be obvious to the casual observer, but IT is under siege. The cloud, in all its incarnations, is reshaping the way IT thinks about delivering services to the business. Conversely, the cloud is also providing new avenues for the business to procure IT services. For the first time, business users who consume IT services have a choice: if IT cannot provide them with the services they require in a timely and cost-effective manner, they’ll simply go elsewhere.

Some CIOs have taken to labeling this trend “shadow IT,” in that users are following the path of least resistance – IT policies be damned. The ubiquity of these cloud services, meanwhile, is forcing CIOs to understand their cost structure at a much more granular level. After all, if you know that it costs $7 per GB of storage to go with Amazon S3, but can’t say with any certainty what you spend on storage, it’s hard to have a meaningful conversation with the business. To put it another way, the cloud is putting increased pressure on CIOs to deliver IT services at established “market rates.”

Sunny Gupta is the President, CEO and Chairman for Apptio, a leading provider of on-demand Technology Business Management solutions. For more stories on how CIOs are driving cost transparency in their organizations, visit the Lean IT Blog.

This is but one of the reasons why IT leaders are under pressure to bridge the widening gap that exists between IT and the business units it serves. For too long now, these CIOs have had to combat the perception that “IT is too expensive.”

In a recent meeting, more than 65 enterprise CIOs and IT leaders shared on how they are applying transformational strategies in their organizations to keep up with the change. The gathering featured case study presentations from Rebecca Jacoby, CIO for Cisco, Charlie McNerney, GM for Microsoft Global Foundation Services and the VP of Technical Operations at a Fortune 50 entertainment company. What follows are three “new rules” gleaned from their experience in aligning IT with business priorities:

Rule #1: CIOs Need to Manage IT Like a Supply Chain

Today’s intelligence-starved CIO is beginning to think about IT less as a collection of technology products and more as a portfolio of IT services that should be managed like a traditional supply chain. In the supply chain of IT, these resources consist of everything from data center facilities and labor costs all the way up through the server and application tiers. Taken together, these components make up the IT services that business units eventually consume. However, getting a handle on what these services actually cost to deliver – and how they’re being utilized – has until now been more dark art than science. CIOs believe it’s critical to understand the fully burdened costs of all the raw materials (i.e., the cost of goods sold or “COGS”) that comprise the finished product. From there, the CIOs believe it was imperative to relay the information back to business users. Only then can both the supply and demand curves for IT services be properly tuned. One participant at the roundtable, Charlie McNerney at Microsoft, repeatedly reminded the group, “If you make the facts available, rational minds will eventually prevail.”

Rule #2: Cost Accounting is the New Must Have IT Skill

CIOs with IT transformation projects on their agenda must recognize that cultural changes are just as important as technology decisions.

An overlooked and essential skill for the new generation of IT personnel is basic cost accounting. For example, at Cisco, every person in the CIOs organization is required to take a basic class on cost accounting. Without this foundational skill, they believe (and rightfully so) that IT managers are unable to provide meaningful cost analysis back to the business. For instance, while calculating unit cost information at the server level might be valuable from an operational perspective, understanding and communicating the variance in cost is more relevant to the business since this type of data point speaks to the budget planning cycle.

Rule #3: IT Transformation Starts with Culture

CIOs with IT transformation projects on their agenda must recognize that cultural changes are just as important as technology decisions.One thing all of these CIOs readily agree upon is that the business is demanding greater accountability and alignment from IT. The cloud is but one external factor driving CIOs to “self reflect” by understanding their own cost structures at a deeper level and delivering services at market rates. CIOs who are prepared to answer questions from the business with cold, hard facts will be in a significantly better position to transform their IT organization and contribute to the bottom line.

Lucas123 writes “Years after announcing they had developed holographic optical disc technology that could store 500GB of data, GE this week said they’re preparing to license the technology to manufacturing partners. At the same time, InPhase, which failed to actually get its holographic disc product out the door for years, says GE’s product is nothing more than a ‘science project,’ and it’s own optical disc is almost ready to go to market — again. But, as one analyst quipped, the old joke about optical disc is that ‘there’s more written about optical disc than stored on it.’”

An anonymous reader writes “A UK High Court judge has ruled that BT must block access to a website which provides links to pirated movies. Justice Arnold ruled that BT must use its blocking technology CleanFeed — which is currently used to prevent access to websites featuring child sexual abuse — to block Newzbin 2. ‘Currently CleanFeed is dealing with a small, rural road in Scotland,’ ISPA council member James Blessing told BBC Radio 4′s PM programme. ‘Trying to put Newzbin and other sites into the same blocking technology would be a bit like shutting down the M1. It is not designed to do that.’ Digital rights organisation the Open Rights Group said the result could set a “dangerous” precedent. “Website blocking is pointless and dangerous. These judgements won’t work to stop infringement or boost creative industries. And there are serious risks of legitimate content being blocked and service slowdown. If the goal is boosting creators’ ability to make money from their work then we need to abandon these technologically naive measures, focus on genuine market reforms, and satisfy unmet consumer demand,” said ORG campaigner Peter Bradwell.”

It looks like Apple is planning to include face recognition capabilities in iOS 5.

9 to 5 Mac has discovered several face recognition APIs in iOS 5 beta 4 that was seeded to developers late last week.

9 to 5 Mac reports:

We have taken a look at these iOS 5-exclusive APIs and they are highly sophisticated. The first, called CIFaceFeature, can determine through an image where a personâ€™s mouth and eyes are located. The second API, CIDetector, is a resource within the operating system that processes images for face detection.

Â Â Â hasLeftEyePosition

Â Â hasRightEyePosition

Â Â Â hasMouthPosition

Â Â Â leftEyePosition

Â Â Â rightEyePosition

Â Â Â mouthPosition

This presumably would power face detection via live motion imagery. The significance of this finding is that Apple is making face detection an even easier feature for developers to implement.

9 to 5 Mac speculates that Apple will open up these APIs either to developers to make it easier to implement face recognition technology in their iOS apps or Apple could be working behind the scenes in developing a killer app using these face recognition APIs.

Apple had acquired Polar Rose, a Swedish face recognition company in 2010, and it is quite likely that their technology is being used for this feature in iOS.

You can checkout the demo video of an augmented reality app called Recognizr, which Polar Rose co-developed to get a glimpse of what to expect:

Another example isÂ RecognizeMe â€“ a jailbreak app already brings biometric face recognition security to iPhone, which generated quite a bit of interest from our readers. Checkout the demo video of the app:

As always, let us know your thoughts about the possibility of face recognition technology in future version of iOS in the comments section below.

destinyland writes “A technology CEO sees game artificial intelligence as the key to a revolution in education, predicting a synergy where games create smarter humans who then create smarter games. Citing lessons drawn from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, Alex Peake, founder of Primer Labs, sees the possibility of a self-fueling feedback loop which creates ‘a Moore’s law for artificial intelligence,’ with accelerating returns ultimately generating the best possible education outcomes. ‘What the computer taught me was that there was real muggle magic …’ writes Peake, adding ‘Once we begin relying on AI mentors for our children and we get those mentors increasing in sophistication at an exponential rate, we’re dipping our toe into symbiosis between humans and the AI that shape them.’”

The physical world should feel a little more comfy now: Gravity is a little bit less than it was last Thursday. And the electromagnetic force? A smidge stronger.

Every four years, the National Institute of Science and Technology adjusts the official values of such natural constants to reflect more accurate measurements made possible by advancing technology. This week, in the latest update, the radius of a proton, the speed of light, the Planck constant, and many, many others have received facelifts that will decrease uncertainty in physics measurements. But this update will also affect units much closer to home: In October, the General Conference on Weights and Measures will vote on a measure to base the definition of a kilogram on the values of such natural constants, instead of the 130-year-old slug of platinum and iridium that currently holds the title.

For the time being, the current upgrade will likely trickle down to we armchair physicists once Google Calculator, the search giant’s handy-dandy constant provider, starts using the new numbers. Judging from its current value for the Planck constant, it’s still working from the 2006 data.

siliconbits writes “Two months after Apple joined the Bluetooth special interest group board, the company launched the world’s first truly mainstream Bluetooth 4.0 devices, namely the new Macbook Air & Mac Mini 2011 editions. The products came only one year after the official core specifications of Bluetooth 4.0 were adopted and it looks likely that Apple fast-tracked Bluetooth 4.0′s adoption so that the forthcoming iPhone 5 can use this technology with at least one Apple product. This could mean that the manufacturer is considering giving up on NFC altogether, a technology embraced by all of its rivals.”

alphadogg writes “Napkins don’t really stack up well against hard drives or even floppy disks for preserving data over time. But some of the technology and business world’s most enduring ideas are said to have at least gotten their starts as sketches on dinner or cocktail napkins (which in fact were inspiration for the 5 ¼ floppy disk’s size). Robert Metcalfe’s early Ethernet diagrams from his days at Xerox PARC back in the early 1970s might be the most famous napkin sketches in the technology industry, but there are napkin stories involving Compaq, Facebook, @home and more”

An anonymous reader writes “Ford is touring U.S. cities demonstrating a technology that appears to closely resemble a private dynamic network among multiple cars. The cars connect to each other via short-range Wi-Fi (which actually has a reach of half a mile) and enables vehicles to exchange location and movement data. Being aware of each other’s location and movement direction enables them to help drivers avoid collisions, especially in situations where obstacles cannot be identified fast enough. The technology could be available for consumers as soon as 2013.”